Ivan Vendrov

July 31st, 2024

• coercion: coercion is inefficient — convo/debate w Ivan Vendrov
  • links from Ivan afterwards
    • scientificamerican.com/article/is-your-nervous-system-a-democracy-or-a…
    • americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/08/the-conservation-of-coercion/
    • palladiummag.com/2023/07/13/dont-learn-your-values-from-society/
  • times
    • 0:00 intro, background context
    • 03:40 can Ivan control Malcolm?
    • 0:5:25 professional examples of interpersonal control
    • 17:00 traps along the way
    • 22:30 depression from stopping coercive motivation without already having joyful motivation
    • 27:28 Roman use of "discipline" & "virtue"
    • 32:40 how to measure motivational efficiency
    • 34:15 coercion has goodhart built-in
    • dishes example
    • 41:40 jobs you love, jobs you hate
    • 52:30 internal conflict causes stuckness & oscillations
    • 58:00 pre-coercive culture got outcompeted
    • 1:02:50 aiming for a new thing that feels better
    • 1:07:45 propaganda against your animal
    • 1:12:00 theology: does reality punish/coerce you?
    • 1:16:20 early history of science
    • 1:19:50 limits of cultural propaganda
    • 1:22:00 cultural knowledge greater than individual - secret of our success
    • 1:27:40 overcoordinated - overshoulded
    • 1:30:00 cultural transition phases
    • 1:35:30 research agenda: the shift
    • 1:37:45 law of conservation of coercion?
    • 1:41:30 our equiv of "drosophilia" for testing
  • notes
    • examples of control
      • employment, salaried employee
        • threat of "if you don't do what you're told, you'll be fired or some other terrible consequence"
      • military
    • other examples
      • slavery
      • communism
    • "more or less coercive equilibria"
    • Trinley
      • ^22 mins in at 8:35, suggests start time of reco was 8:13
    • essay from A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
      • romans use of virtus & disciplina
      • virtue - raw energy & courage
      • discipline - thing that contains & channels it into [noble] end
    • coercion has goodhart built-in
    • compromise - halfway between goals, neither satisfied
    • planetary scale vibe collapse
    • andrew cutler - cultural diffusion
    • wolf's conception of the abrahamic god as that which stands in for real reality
    • punishment etc
    • early history of science
    • love - supercoop
    • Secret of our Success
    • existentialism is a humanism
    • "I'm free to do whatever I want"
    • cybernetics or computational model of coordination that is too vague in both of our minds for us to really get at the crux of our disagreement
    • research agenda:
      • can we characterize in a clear way, why it was that the coercive pattern won out over the ancestral vibe-based pattern?
      • drosophilia / e coli
    • parenting not mattering - maybe because monitoring causes masking
      • whereas peers are where you develop naturally
    • ---
    • "this is what we're doing" is obviously faster than consensus
      • but also you can have "someone just says this is what we're doing" without coercion
        • you just need trust! but then how do you get trust
    • I > if we rotated in other concepts, like "trust", other things get simpler
    • externalities